thoughts – Page 2 – D’Arcy Norman dot net

on twitter

I deleted my twitter account. After posting almost 11,000 tweets over a year and a half. And I don’t miss it. I don’t regret it.

Twitter is a strange, unique beast. At first blush, it’s a tool to connect people and to share information.

But that’s not really what twitter is, at all.

Twitter is probably one of the most powerful experiments in behaviorist conditioning ever crafted. Neither Pavlov’s dogs nor Skinner’s pigeons were as well trained as the thousands of people madly clicking refresh refresh refresh refreshrefreshrefreshREFRESH in the hopes of scoring a quick high from fresh information (or worse – using the desktop apps that display the updates instantly).

What twitter claims to do, it does astonishingly well. Ad hoc informal groups, defined and refined by each member according to the people they are interested in. No other service provides quite the same level of transparent control and flexibility for each and every individual.

But when I post a tweet, or read someone else’s, it is not as it seems. It feels as though there is some form of tight connection, a baring of souls, a bond. But that’s not possible, given the limit of 140 bytes of ASCII text.

Which means that twitter is really nothing more than a giant plastic piano, with it’s members the chickens obsessively pecking at keys until food pellets are released. We’re not aware of the keys, the piano, nor of the song we’re being trained to play.

I keep coming back to one thing. Who is paying for twitter, and why? It’s not advertising. At least Facebook is clearly partially financed by advertising revenue.

The only value I see in twitter, from a financial point of view, that even comes close to justifying the expense if providing the service, is to teach The Machine. The constant tweeting, linking, geopositioning updates are providing a vast database which can then be mined. But why, and by whom?

So I decided to opt out of this strange experiment.

One thing I’ve found is that by removing myself from the Pavlovian update/response feedback loop, I feel as though my thinking is clearer. I’m more present. I’m not constantly distilling my life into 140 character chunks, nor am I constantly wondering if there are any @dnorman tweets waiting for me.

Another thing I find is that I now use richer and deeper channels of communication. I’m not trying to stuff conversations into short asynchronous segments. I’m talking in realtime via IM. I’m communicating in more depth via email. I’m writing more and better blog posts.

One thing that surprised me is the reaction from people. Some seem to think this is some extreme or scary act. How could someone possibly delete their twitter account? wow!

But twitter is just a website. It’s not even my website. Someone else’s website. Nothing more. Deleting the account means absolutely nothing. Anyone that is truly interested in knowing what I’m doing will use any of the countless other channels (like, for instance, my blog posts) to find out. Anyone that really cares about what I’m doing is already connected to me on so many other channels that dropping the connection via twitter will have no effect.

So long, twitter. It’s been fun. But I need to stop pecking keys and waiting for food pellets.

photographic diversity through repetition

I’ve been feeling in a photographic rut lately. It seems like all of my photos look the same. They’re of the same thing. They’re all of things I’ve photographed before. Same. Similar. Again. Repeat. Done it. been there. Oh, that again. Gottit…

I just popped onto the Photography tab of my blog, and it hit me – although things feel strongly similar, there is variation and diversity. And sometimes repetition of similar photographs and subjects tells a story in and of itself.

giving thanks

Thanksgiving is here. And I have lots to be thankful for, including (but not limited to):

I’ve got an awesome family, full of love and happiness.
Evan is growing up to be an amazing, inspiring young man.
Dad laughed at the doctors that gave him 6 months to live. Over a decade ago. He’s still going strong, for 73.
I have friends that I admire, respect, and look up to, and who know this.
As I hit 39, I’m in the best physical, mental and emotional shape of my entire life, and it feels great.

on democratic leader’s debates

It appears as though 3 of the 4 major national political parties have balked at the suggestion that Elizabeth May represent the Green Party at the televised leader’s debates.

The Green Party is a valid national party, now with a seat in Parliament (although the member was previously an Independent who switched to Green, not an elected Green MP).

According to The Canadian Press,

But Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Monday that letting May into the debate would be in essence allowing a second Liberal candidate to participate.

He said it would be fundamentally unfair to have two candidates who are essentially running on the same platform in the debate.

Really?

Harper gets to decide on who gets to participate in the debate based on his assessment of the uniqueness of their platform? That’s not how democracy works. The leader does not get to decide which voices get to be heard, or which issues will be discussed.

All this exercise tells me is that the televised leader’s debates are nothing more than sanitized synchronous press releases. If it was a valid and honest debate, the Green party would be represented (as well as, perhaps, a few other parties).

And Harper wasn’t the only leader to threaten to boycott the debates if the Greens were allowed to participate. The only leader that welcomed May was Stephane Dion. Which means that Layton and Duceppe are right up there with Harper in avoiding a real, meaningful, democratic debate.

Threatening to boycott a debate if another valid candidate is invited to participate? Childish and undemocratic.

Update: And for the Canadian media outlets that decided to not invite May to the debate so as not to upset the other candidates – you just lost any shred of objectivity. You are no longer a separate, objective, impartial media. You are nothing more than media outlets. You are not journalists, you are not unbiased. You are a press-release distribution network. The right thing to do would have been to respond to the 3 candidates that they are welcome to participate in the debate, and would be missed by the voting public if they choose not to show up.

Update 2: w00t! score one for democracy in Canada! The Green Party will be at the debates!

inquiry as a subversive activity

I’ve been reading Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (more info), and I’m finding myself extremely drawn into it. It’s the kind of book that I may have read as an undergrad, but just wasn’t ready for. It’s the kind of book where you need to be ready to really engage with it before it makes sense. And it’s the kind of book that has me rethinking pretty much everything, and seeing new patterns everywhere. The book was written before I was born, and published only a few months before I was. But it feels so intrinsically relevant and important today – maybe moreso now than in 1969.

One of the chapters is describing inquiry, and what an honest adoption of inquiry would mean for curriculum, education, and society at large. What does it mean when curriculum isn’t predefined, and must be pulled from individuals and groups through the act of questioning, and the process of making sense? What does that look like?

Although much of it rings as important, even critical, to adopt in education, I think a full-scale adoption of inquiry would require more than just a tweak of the education system – it would require essentially nuking every concept of curriculum, and assessment, which would in turn require nuking large parts of entire educational institutions (and non-educational ones as well) and rebuilding from scratch. Sounds nice, but it’s just not practical.

Then, I turned the page and hit something I hadn’t seen before. A blank page, filled with handwritten sentences. At first I thought there was something wrong with the book. Postman and Weingartner had been talking about eliciting questions from the reader. And their implementation was to actually leave room inside the book for contributions from the reader. Not a blank page at the back of the book with “Notes:” stenciled on the top. Not a generic page for random scribbling. A blank page, with the specific purpose of eliciting responses from the reader: What questions would you ask if there was no curriculum? What is worth knowing?

It’s a simple technique, but shows a few things in action.

The simple act of honestly asking for contributions radically changes the nature of the experience. One is no longer simply “reading” the book – they are helping to write it.
Inquiry doesn’t need to be a Big Scary Thing – it can be as small and simple as asking a question, and allowing all responses. Note that the authors didn’t say “what topics are important?” or “what are the fundamental subjects that should be taught?” – they asked “what is worth knowing?” and that is a pretty simple yet powerful question, leading to further simple yet powerful questions in response.
Starting from a set of open-ended questions, one can start to define some paths for further inquiry pretty quickly. Inquiry isn’t chaos – it’s finding out what matters to the individual participants, and then searching for strategies to finding solutions and answers. It’s not the absence of content, or the absence of direction. It’s placing the focus of the activities of teaching and learning on the individual, and finding what their needs are, in various contexts.

And others have used similar strategies to draw people into conversations and presentations. I was able to help facilitate an inquiry-based session a few years ago with Brian and Alan, and it was one of the most powerful experiences I can remember. Stephen Downes has been doing this for years – I had the pleasure to see his new EduRSS (now gRSShopper) backchannel running at TLt this summer during his presentation.

Sure, some of the responses are silly when there are no restraints placed on contributions. But some responses are deep, thoughtful, relevant, engaging, engaged, and enriching. And the participants care about what is going on.

If inquiry is honest, and participants are working together to identify questions that they feel are valid – and then to answer them – that is a powerfully subversive activity that can change education from simple content dissemination into something that is so much more engaging and relevant. It changes education from being an industrial age “teaching factory” to an organic, adaptive, extensible process.

And I’m not using subversion in a negative sense. From Wikipedia:

Subversion refers to an attempt to overthrow structures of authority, including the state. It is an overturning or uprooting.

fracking spammers

I’ve found several comment-spam campaign management applications mentioned in my blog’s referrer stats. Most appear to be from Turkey – is that the new hotbed of spam?

And, so far, all appear to be .aspx applications.

Is there a positive correlation between jackass cretin spammers, and MCSE-accredited web developers? Coincidence? Or is .aspx just the current fave platform of brainless L337 Skrypt Kiddies?

Just imagine if all of the energy spent trying to blast comment spam onto blogs, and spent trying to prevent said comment spam blasting from being successful, was instead directed toward something positive. Like curing cancer. Or feeding the hungry.

Damn you, Google, for setting up (and maintaining) an economic incentive for lowlife scumsucking douchebags to try to benefit by foisting spam across the ‘net. The amount of wasted time, energy, and karma is simply mindboggling.

work with the tool, not against it

I have a recurring pattern when implementing a project. I start simple. Then things get complex. Then I start overthinking, overdesigning, overengineering things. And they start getting really, really cumbersome, awkward, and unmanageable.

I’ve done this with every development platform I’ve used. WebObjects. Rails. PHP. WordPress. Moodle. Drupal.

Yes, even Drupal.

So, again, I need to remind myself.

Work WITH the tool.

NOT against it.

Or, if you’re working too hard, you’re doing it wrong. If things are designed properly, using the most appropriate approaches, more often than not things become quite simple. Easy, even. If something isn’t easy, it’s being done wrong.

If you’re writing a bunch of custom code, you’re probably heading off on a blind alley. Chuck the custom code and find a shared framework, module, plugin, etc… that will do the job. The less code you write, the less to debug and maintain.

I’m working on a website for an agency, where I’m building a system to manage the data and daily operations of a 100-person organization. I’d started writing custom code to embed snippets of processed data. I was writing code to chunk data into reporting periods, grouped by staff member, client, and any number of other criteria.

But – Views already does that. When combined with other modules like Calendar to provide the date-based chunking. And some other helpers to expose UI widgets and data selectors.

So, by working WITH the tools at hand, I just dumped a bunch of silly custom code. I’ll need to refactor a bunch of stuff, but it will work much better in the long run, and take MUCH less to maintain.

The biggest thing I have to do at the moment is refining the data entry process – I need to find the best date selector widgets to make the process as painless and error-free as possible when in use in the field.

one week of twittersilence

It’s been just over a week since I decided to make Twitter a read-only medium. I haven’t posted a single tweet, and have only scanned Twitter a handful of times in that week.

And I haven’t missed it one bit.

I’ve been having many more IM chats with the people I care about. I’ve been conversing more via email. I’ve been writing more blog posts. I haven’t dropped offline. I haven’t disconnected. All I’ve done is lengthen the feedback loop – no more constant reloading of Twitter.com to see if there are updates. No more composing tweets while offline. Just a healthy balance, and a reconfiguration of the social connections.

This is going to sound bad, although it’s not meant to. But most of what happens on Twitter – I just don’t care about. People I don’t know. People I simply don’t care about. Not that they’re not good people, or smart, or funny. Just that they are not people I know. And as a result, I simply don’t care to hear constant updates and jabber from and about. There is a strange distortion that I noticed on Twitter, where I was spending a fair amount of time reading updates from people that I don’t know. I’ve never met them. I don’t read their blogs. So why am I bothering to read their tweets? It sounds bad, and goes against the spirit of 2.0 – being connected to everyone all the time – but pulling back to a closer, tighter, more important (to me) group of people just feels right.

Here’s the crux of it for me. Overextension of social connections dilutes and devalues them. Hyperconnectivity negates the connections I care about. If everyone is a “friend” – what does that mean to my real friends? If I spend as much time reading updates from strangers as I do from the people I really care about, that’s not fair to the people I care about, nor to myself.

on the future of education

I’ll keep this rant short. I don’t know what the future of education is, or will be, but I do know that it’s not “web 2.0” despite the hype.

Education is, always has been, and always will be, about the acts of teaching and learning. It is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, a form of technology. It is not a suite of distributed online tools, no matter how buzzword compliant they might be.

We need to move past this infatuation with technology, this desire for shiny things to change everything, and get back to basics. To storytelling. To valuing and respecting the work of all participants (students, teachers, and others). To working together to teach our children, and ourselves. To extending the activity outside of some industrialized classroom and into the community.

Sure, “web 2.0” has a role in this – in providing tools to enable individual publishing and collaboration – but it is NOT the technology that is the future of education. It’s people. Without proper philosophies and pedagogies, all the shiny websites on the planet don’t add up to a hill of beans.

(donning asbestos underoos in preparation for ensuing deluge of fire and brimstone)

on the danger of twitter

Twitter has been bugging me for some time now. No, not the single-digit uptime. No, not the constant “Down for Updates” notices. No, not the slow unresponsive website and throttled API.

I just realized that Twitter is actually dangerous. Harmful. Damaging.

It has changed the way that I think, but not for the better. I find I am thinking more superficially when I’m active in Twitter. I think in shorter 140 character bursts. With little to no depth.

Now, Twitter is a really amazing environment – it’s been by FAR the most powerful social amplifier I’ve used. I’ve felt closer to the people that I care about online because I’ve been let in to their every day lives, just as they have been let into mine.

Although the things that get posted to Twitter are mostly banal and boring details of every day life, that is one of the things that makes it so addictive. So powerful. It’s not a “content managing system”, nor is it “publishing” – it’s a way to reinforce a personal connection. Every time I read an update by someone that I care about, I think about that person – if only for a second – and my sense of connection is strengthened.

But, I fear that the strengthened social connections are not worth the cost borne in superficial thinking. Being more closely connected is an extremely valuable thing – and Twitter is somehow able to make my connections to people online feel almost tangible, almost real – but not at the cost of shallow thinking.

When I catch myself offline, in the mountains with my family, wondering what people are posting to Twitter, and how I would describe what I’m doing in 140 characters, it’s become damaging. Distracting. Dangerous.

I’m not going to sign off of Twitter. I am going to try to experience it differently. Without the Twitter Tab constantly open and refreshed. Without any Twitter apps on my iPod. I don’t want to lose the sense of connectedness, but I need to repair and restore my ability to think more deeply.